When My Stepbrother Went Missing

by Emily Schulten

I found out in a news clip, sent from someone I didn’t know well: A whole person lost, a shadow,

dissipated into cloud (like my friend who pictures the tumor in her sister’s leg, shrinking, and it works),the heat of blood there, then gone.

There were lights, plane blades, large groups breaking into small groups, into grids. They were dragging the creek, shining white lights onto ground, onto tree limbs, onto hollowed out nighttime.

But he was nowhere. Six feet and two inches of man, now wind.

What would you do, you ask, if you woke up, and I was missing?

I want to tell you I would find you, even if it meant my whole life was a search. Even if what I found was only remains.

I would dream you, dream you out of coral until the sand gave slack enough to become your body. I would build you out of stilt roots and wire. No, out of bark and clay. No, out of even less, from a storm’s first gust.

But it’s a lie. We both know I would come to waking each morning without wailing, soon without crying at all, and then just without, smoothing the bedcovers, petting the panting dog.

It took two days to find my stepbrother. He crawled out of the mouth of a cave where he’d slept, climbed the shale rockand knocked softly on a farmhouse door, oblivious to what had happened in the night.

Emily Schulten is the author of Rest in Black Haw (New Plains, 2009). She is a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys.

Family Funhouse

by Matt Kelsey

—after Athena Farrokhzad

My mother said she was my mother and then gave me to her mother.My father looked into my crib and crieduncle. My unclesaid we would never be brothers.My brothers said we would neverever be brothers.My judge said pics or it didn’t happen. My mother acts as if nothing happened.My older brother called me once when I was a teen and said he wished he hadn’t happened.When I called my younger brother he’d say guess which animal I am and then moo and say no I’m a pig.My older brother said why come back as a dog in the next life when you can be a horse a lion and a bear in this one.My grandmother said I can be anything I want to be.My grandfather said best to be seen and not heard.When I’d visit my younger brother we didn’t speak, just ran to the bathroom mirror, twisted our faces until we forgot where we were.

Matt Kelsey is webmaster for RHINO magazine and teaches on the South Side of Chicago. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and teaching fellowships from the University of Washington for their writing programs in Rome and Friday Harbor. His poems appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets (Virginia, 2010), Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Pacifica Literary Review and The Monarch Review.

Neighbors

by Michael Pontacoloni

Cold nights we stayed up late together,watched Help! and Planet Earth,

or you cooked me carbonaraafter I got home from hockey.

Nights that we said nothing of your boyfriend or my girlfriend,

said nothing of our bodiesthat kept silent on the couch

though we shared a blanket staringat a fireplace I madeof Christmas lights and cardboard.

and someone’s elbow knocked a bottle off the railing.I wanted to hold you

how that bottle held the sidewalk.

Michael Pontacoloni’s poems appear in Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, New Ohio Review and Pleiades. He lives in Connecticut and works for a small software firm.

Bonsai

by Graham Henderson

we spent the rainy day looking at bonsai.on the last visit, snowflakes and leaves fell.winter froze the pond, a ring of ice and small circle of water. who paid admission last time? neither of us had a job. ah, we got in free, because we rode bikes.

i’ve met someone who was at peace.that’s too much a lie, even for fiction.but i’ve seen plants, who struggle slower.

Graham Henderson self-published his first short story collection, Hendrix the Worm and Other Stories, in 2016. A graduate of the Loyola University Chicago School of Communication, he writes and performs sketch and improv comedy with the Chicago group Scantron.

Weâ€™ll All Be Drowned

by Emily Schulten

All at once something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again.—The Holy Bible: International Standard Version

Lean your ear close to the tide, my dear, learn the sound of swallowing. The scales blind men’s eyes now, afraid to see, that one day soon we’ll all be drowned.

The algae line on the brick rises toward the canon’s mouth,a quiet advance moves unnoticed to take three forts.Lean your ear close to the tide, my dear, learn the sound

of the language your children will know, the muted depth where you will kneel when it’s thigh deep, tooafraid to see that one day soon we’ll all be drowned.

Gather where that steeple raises a star to the sky, but don’tpray, picture on its angles where the sea grass will snag,and lean your ear close to the tide, my dear, learn the sound,

prepare now for the fools who thought they’d built heavento paddle among the fish in the streets, their own floundering,afraid to see that one day soon we’d all be drowned.

Watch wood floors buckle, stone gardens grow, submit to the glass breaking, everything turning blue, andlean your ear close to the tide, my dear, learn the sound and see, that one day soon we’ll all be drowned.

Emily Schulten is the author of Rest in Black Haw (New Plains, 2009). She is a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys.